Healthy Present!

Greens from My Boss's Neighbor　--- Thanks! :D When I was about to leave the office after work yesterday afternoon, my boss’s neighbor dropped by. He gave us loads of fresh green vegetables: mizuna (potherb mustard or California peppergrass) and spinach! I was really happy, but I wasn’t sure what I should use mizuna for. When I came back to my apartment, I met the lady living downstairs. I gave her half of the greens and she was totally delighted. (So what’s in the pic is half of the greens he gave me.) Back in my room, I googled for a while to find a good way to use the mizuna. This green vegetable is commonly used for nabe (hotpot dish) in winter, but it’s still too hot for that. Salad seemed like a better idea, so I picked a salad recipe with an interesting dressing. Here! The greens turned into these dishes. Spinach Cheese Omelet Oh, this was heavenly :) Sorry, I'm a ketchup freak. Mizuna Salad with White Fish and Parmesan Cheese Though the recipe I found on the net used raw mizuna, I softened mine by powering hot water all over. The good thing about this vegetable is that its stems stay very crispy even after being heated. But mizuna has a slight bitterness and that's why I was not too crazy about this vegetable. The ingredients for the dressing was: sesame oil, vinegar, miso, soy sauce and sesame seeds. The white fish was sea bream (raw). And the cheese sprinkled on top gave this dish a little Western touch, which was pretty good. The slight bitterness of mizuna didn't bother me at all : ) I still have some of the greens left… I boiled and froze the spinach, but I don’t think that works for the other one. Hmmm... I'm gonna have to look for a few more mizuna recipes...

I Love the Refreshing Aftertaste!

Earl Grey Tea Cake Roll with Fig & Cream Filling This is the best outcome I got from a few try-outs I did this summer. Dear readers, this is supposed to be “earl grey tea cake roll with fig and cream filling.” Weird? Different? But this was not as bad as you might think, honestly. I got the idea of this unique cake roll from our local pastry shop’s “ Cake roll of the month.” The one displayed at the shop looked so scrumptious, but was expensive, so I thought about making one myself. It is fig season now and the fruit is on the shelf at almost every supermarket. So why not?! I googled for a recipe of “black tea cake roll” and found one at a Japanese recipe site. It needed to be downsized to half, but seemed suitable for what I was going to make. The twist was, of course, the fig; I expected that adding it to the cream filling would make the rolling-up part difficult, and I was right. This was by no means an excellent job, but I have an excuse. My small oven can only take 18x18 cm square cake pan inside, and it’s more difficult to roll up when the sponge cake is smaller. (Right?) And with the fruit chunks in the filling, you know. Maybe I should have baked a thinner sponge and let the air out of the batter more thoroughly before baking. Tastewise, this wasn't bad at all, honestly. The cream-and-fig combination was nice with the pleasant crunchiness of the fig seeds. What I loved the most was the refreshing aftertaste from the ground earl grey tea leaves in the sponge cake. I’m interested in trying "earl grey cake roll" with other fruits like pear or persimmon in the filling, so there will be several more cake roll entries on this blog this autumn. Don’t get dizzy ;)

A Little Atypical Warabimochi

Warabimochi Looking cool and refreshing, don’t you think? These are called warabimochi (bracken-starch dumplings). For those who have never heard of such a thing before, warabimochi is one of the refreshing Japanese summer sweets and awfully easy to make. You just mix bracken-starch powder, sugar and water, heat in a saucepan, pour into a vat, refrigerate, and when settled, cut into bite-size chunks and sprinkle/coat with sugar-mixed kinako (roasted soybean powder). Some people love them with dark syrup. Those who know warabimochi might feel like yelling at the photo, “But obachan, what is the aonori (green laver flakes) doing on top of the dumplings? Hey, they are not takoyaki!! ” I know, I know. It is not very common to eat bracken-starch dumplings this way. But I like it because a little bit of laver flakes adds a refreshing flavor. It is not my own idea…it's something I learned last year from a vendor. This may not apply to Kanto area, but in Kansai in summer, you often hear the pre-recorded voice from warabimochi vendor’s van, repeating “waaa--rabiii--mochiiiii---.” I usually buy the dumplings at a supermarket, but just once last summer, I bought some from a vendor in Kochi city. He asked me if I wanted aonori in addition to kinako, and from curiosity I said yes. Since then it has been my habit to eat this dessert with both kinako AND aonori. These are from a supermarket, not home-made I guess warabimochi is more commonly served like this. Anyway, it is a wonderful summer dessert with a LONG history (-- said to be invented about 1,000 years ago). The dumplings are a lot stickier than jelly and really remind you of the texture of mochi (rice cake), which is almost addicting… at least, for me ;)

Broccoli Potage Soup

Broccoli Potage Soup For the painful work of cleaning up the closet and kitchen that I did last weekend, I bought myself a reward today. It’s an electric blender, the cheapest kind that has been on sale at the mall for months. I had always wanted one, but it was not the price that kept me from buying one this summer. I simply couldn’t stand the idea of adding one more thing to the chaos in my kitchen. The mess was almost making me nuts and I repeated in front of the mirror hundreds of times, “No more kitchen utensils until I get rid of all the crap!!” Well, I finally did the major throwing away this weekend, and now this new, inexpensive electric blender is officially welcomed in my kitchen. Of all the things you can make using an electric blender, I chose “broccoli potage soup” as the first mission for this newcomer. The reasons were: 1) I like broccoli, 2) for some reason I like green-colored soup, and 3) there were some leftover boiled broccoli in the freezer that I wanted to use up. Even though I call it “broccoli potage,” I used other vegetables, too. Cooked onion, garlic and potatoes were thrown into the blender in addition to boiled broccoli. My home-made chicken stock I froze a few months ago was also used for this soup. The result was quite satisfactory! I knew I was supposed to strain the soup through a fine strainer or something, but this time I decided not to waist the rich fiber of the vegs. And the thick soup tasted good even without straining. I think I can call this a success : ) Too bad the photo cannot show the real nice green color of the soup! Green is always the problem with my digital camera... * Sorry, I replaced the photo on top because I couldn't stand the color of the previous one.

Herb-Grilled Salmon

Herb-Grilled Salmon Salmon fillets were on sale yesterday at a nearby supermarket and that triggered me to make herb-grilled salmon for supper last night. At first I was going to use a frying pan, but while googling to find a sauce recipe, I changed my mind and decided to go for foil-grilled salmon. I thought that being wrapped in aluminum foil, the herbs won’t get burned and would keep their fragrance better. Unfortunately yesterday was certainly not my day. After I seasoned the salmon fillets with salt and pepper, I wanted to sprinkle some wine all over, and remembered that I had used up the white wine the other day. So I used a little sake instead. Then I topped the fillets with butter chunks, wrapped them with aluminum foil, sealed the edges carefully, and heated in toaster oven. When I opened the fridge to make mustard sauce – that was my choice of sauce last night – I found out that I didn’t have any mustard left. So I thought about going for wasabi- mayonnaise sauce, because I was sure that I had some wasabi left from the Tosa-maki dinner the other day. Alas, I ran out of mayonnaise the day before :O While I stood helplessly in front of the fridge, the salmon in the toaster oven was done. Actually, they looked pretty good when I opened up the foil. So after all, I ended up eating the salmon with lemon squeeze only, which wasn’t totally bad. The butter, salt & pepper and herb gave enough taste, saving the dish from being tasteless. But last night I was in the mood for something with more kick. Maybe I should have fried the fillets with garlic slices instead...

BBQ Chicken & Jambalaya at a Family Restaurant

BBQ Chiken & Jambalaya @ COCO'S I ate out at a family restaurant last night to celebrate my belated pay day. I had what they called “BBQ chicken and Jambalaya,” which was a little disappointing. And if I was not hallucinating, the what-they-call BBQ chicken on top of the jambalaya looked and tasted like pretty crisp karaage (deep-fried) chicken with a little BBQ sauce poured on. (Well, who can expect to have a real great jambalaya at a family restaurant in Japan anyway. ) As for the drink, I tried something I have never tried before: clausthaler non-alcoholic beer. I didn’t want to drink real beer because I was determined to go jogging afterwards. Maybe that was not a good plan… I ended up ordering a dessert there, too, thinking that the jogging afterwards would burn the calories. Dessert: Ice cream with caramel sauce. I did go jogging an hour after supper, but I’m not sure if it really helped. ;P

Apple Marble Cake

Apple Marble Cake Just wanted something to make up for the long day I had yesterday. This cost 200 yen and I thought it was worth the price. Yum!

Childhood Food Memories Meme

Obachan (About 5 y.o. ???) ---- I was tagged by rae of bunnyfoot to present the top five childhood food memories that I miss. Now they are ready with another photo from the days when I was a cute little girl... 1. Egg yolk mixed rice My grandparents used to raise hens and it was my job to pick eggs every morning when I was a kid. As a reward, my mom would put a fresh, raw egg yolk on a bowl of warm rice for me and seasoned it with a little soy sauce (and a pinch of ajinomono --- the inevitable.) It was a sheer joy to break the bright orange-colored egg yolk to mix with the soy sauce first, and then with the whole rice in the bowl. I loved the dish so much that I had it almost 3 times a day every day for a few weeks, and I ended up having hives. Now I don’t really feel like trying it any more. 2. Fish meat hamburger steak This was my typical lunch on weekdays in my childhood (when not at school). My parents were both at work on weekdays, so I had lunch with my grandparents at home. Our lunch was usually something easy to prepare --- leftover miso soup from breakfast, tofu, pickles, leftover simmered food from the night before or stir-fried veggies, AND this “fish meat hamburger steak.” I guess it was not too different from fish meat sausage, but just shaped in a bigger, ham-like shape, and all I had to do was to slice it and fry in a frying pan. Maybe it contained bunch of chemical additives at that time, but I just loved it with a little ketchup. 3. Tamagoyaki-wrapped onigiri for lunch on the beach I'm eating something else, not onigiri in this photo. The lady next to me is mom's friend. My house was really close to the beach ( 1 min walk, maybe?) and my family often went on a picnic there. It was rather a rocky seashore, and in my childhood picnic photos, we are usually sitting on big rocks. My mom often made tamagoyaki-wrapped onigiri (rice balls wrapped by thin omelet) for me and my sister. She seemed to have believed that tamagoyaki-wrapped rice balls were more sophisticated than seaweed-wrapped version, and IIRC, she would add a little ajinomoto to the rice before making the special rice balls. 4. Miso soup porridge This was actually the baby food that my sister and I were most often given. Either my mom or my grandma (or sometimes dad or grandpa) cooked leftover rice in leftover miso soup, added some hot water if it was too salty for babies, and fed us with it. When we got older, we were fed with egg-mixed version of the miso soup porridge more often. I still love it and make it once in a while. 5. House Purin Mix (Instant pudding mix by HOUSE) This is a Japanese style instant pudding mix from House (a Japanese brand), which was a big hit about 30 years ago. All you had to do was to add hot water to dissolve the mix, then pour in small pudding cups and refrigerate. Unlike the real custard pudding, the texture of the "purin (pudding pronounced in Japanese way)" was so soft. Actually it was quite a culture shock when I tasted a steam-baked custard pudding for the first time.　 --- Gee, doesn’t it sound like my childhood was full of egg products, chemical additives and MSG!? For the defense of my mom --- No it wasn’t like that, honestly. She fed me with lots of nutritious foods, too, and I think she did a pretty good job considering how healthy I am now. But somehow, rather unhealthy foods/drinks seem to have left a stronger impression on me in my younger days...;P OK, here’s the four bloggers I’m going to pass this nostalgic task onto: 1. Ting-aling of World Class Cuisine 2. JMom of Our Kitchen 3. Kristi of Would You Like Chocolate or Vanilla 4. Amy of Blue Lotus And here, as the rule says, I made a list with my site at the #5 position. Those who are tagged by me will need to remove the #1 from the list and push up the 4 remaining blogs, then add your blog as #5. (Link to the meme post of each blog on the list.) That’s the rule…I think. 1. Once upon a feast 2. Belly-timber 3. I'm mad and i eat 4. Bunnyfoot 5. Obachan’s Kitchen & Balcony Garden Enjoy! :D

Izakaya Menu #3 - Tosa-Maki (Tosa Roll) -

Tosa-maki (Tosa Roll) Sushi Tosa is the former name of Kochi prefecture. Until the end of the feudal era (about 200 years ago), this area was called Tosa-han (domain), ruled by the shogunate. Even today, many local cuisines or dishes with our local specialty, bonito (or dried bonito flakes) are still called Tosa-something. For example, Tosa-ni means food simmered with lots of bonito flakes. This Tosa-maki is a rolled sushi with seared bonito strips in, and I assume it was named so because seared bonito is Kochi’s most famous local dish. Anyway, we serve this Tosa-maki at the izakaya I work at, and that’s the only reason why I got familiarized with this sushi. My mom never made this at home, and I have never ordered one at any of the sushi restaurants I've visited in and outside Kochi. My life could have ended having nothing to do with this local dish at all, if I hadn’t tasted a piece of leftover Tosa-maki in the izakaya kitchen. Well, when something happens, it just happens, you know. This afternoon I found myself searing a bonito fillet in my kitchen. It was a mere curiosity --- I just wanted to see how close my Tosa-maki could get to what they serve at the izakaya. Read More To make Tosa-maki, you need bonito fillet, shiso (green perilla) leaves, garlic cloves, wasabi (Japanese horseradish paste), sushi rice and nori sheets (dried seaweed). I’m not going to post my recipe here because I think there’ll be very few people who would want to try this out. This is one of those dishes that only locals love, I suppose. The raw garlic slices and shiso leaves can be quite strong and I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of people in this world would find this dish unpleasant. Even I cannot eat one if the chef happened to like it strong and put so much garlic and perilla in the roll. But when the amount of all the ingredients is just right for you.... it brings out an unexpected harmony, and that’s what I like about this Tosa-maki sushi. Here's what I did: STEP 1 --- Cooking rice. I left the job to the electric rice cooker, of course, but I did adjust the amount of water to cook good sushi rice. They say that you should use just a little less amount of water than usual for cooking sushi rice. STEP 2 --- Searing bonito. I bought a half-a-quarter fillet at the store, so no cleaning/filleting job was necessary. All I had to do was searing it. Yes, quick and easy ;) Though some people don’t do this, at our izakaya they sprinkle salt over the bonito fillet before searing, so I did the same. Then I sliced it into several strips. I hate using my small kitchen knife for slicing fish, but that’s all I have now. Seared bonito strips STEP 3 --- Preparing sushi rice. Before the rice was done, I prepared seasoning vinegar, mixing vinegar, sugar and salt together. I’ve read somewhere that the proportion of those ingredients should be basically 5(vinegar) :4(sugar) :1(salt), but it sounded a little too sweet for me. So, for 1 cup of rice cooked, I mixed 5 tsp vinegar, 3 tsp sugar and 1 tsp salt in a bowl and tasted it. Mmm… I would modify the proportion to be 6(vinegar) : 3.5(sugar) : 0.5(salt) next time. It was just too much salt for me. The vinegar should be mixed into rice while the rice is still hot, but the rice has to be cooled down to body temperature to be used for sushi. While cooling the rice, I sliced the garlic ---- No, sorry, I’ll be honest. At that point I noticed that I forgot to buy green perilla leaves and dried seaweed, so I went for additional shopping. At the same supermarket where I bought the bonito a few hours ago, the casher smiled at me like “Hah, you forgot to buy these?” When I came back, the rice was cooled enough. STEP 4 --- Rolling, rolling… :D I placed the dried seaweed over a flame real briefly to lightly roast both sides, then placed it on makisu. Makisu seems to be translated as “sushi rolling mat” or “bamboo mat” etc. on the net and all of them are not wrong. It is what you see under the black, paper-like seaweed in this photo. Then I put rice over the seaweed, placed green perilla leaves, sliced garlic and seared bonito strips on it. Because I don’t like garlic tasting too strong, I left the garlic slices in water for a while beforehand. Now, the key ingredient of this dish is, though you can’t see it clearly in the photo here, is a little amount of wasabi applied on the bonito strips. I think this is what puts everything together and brings out the subtle sweetness of the fish and rice, honestly. The pungent flavor of raw garlic and smell of shiso could be too strong as they are, but surprisingly, this another pungent seasoning, wasabi, somehow harmonizes everything. I could be wrong, but that's the way I feel. Of course, if you put too much of it, it would ruin everything and you would literally end up in tears. ;) I rolled the sushi using the makisu, held it tight (but not too tight) for a few seconds to shape it, then sliced it with, again, the small kitchen knife I didn't like. I wish I had a better knife for that... Of course you can use both hands to roll sushi. I just had to hold my camera with my right hand to take this shot ... At our izakaya, three cooks work at one time, and each cook's Tosa-maki tastes slightly different. More than anything, the taste of this sushi largely depends on the quality of the bonito --- how fresh and how fatty/tasty it is, and the difference it makes is quite amazing. I have to admit that my Tosa-maki was far from what they serve at the izakaya. Well, at least I enjoyed trying this out very much, so I’m satisfied. After all, it's nice to know how to make a local traditional dish. When I eat real good Tosa-maki, I feel lucky to be living here in this rural area close to the Pacific Ocean, and who knows --- one day I might be able to make real good one myself ;) ---- * Today at work, I told one of the cooks there about my Tosa-maki attempt. He said that garlic slices didn’t have to be washed or left in water beforehand if I did a good job in slicing them paper-thin. Maybe it's about time I should think about getting a bigger, better kitchen knife…

Vietnamese Coconut Lemongrass Chicken

Vietnamese Coconut Lemongrass Chicken Seems like my lemongrass loves this hot and humid climate here in Kochi. It is now taller than any other plant in my balcony garden. Hmmm… why haven’t I used this for cooking at all yet? Did I plant it to watch it grow taller and taller? No way. When I bought the young plant of lemongrass, I was really looking forward to trying some new Asian recipes this summer. What happened to my enthusiasm…??? Well, summer is about to be over, and it was this recipe that finally made me decide to use the lemongrass for cooking. I wasn’t looking for a recipe when I found the recipe --- I accidentally came across with that site. Then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute… Why not?” I downsized the recipe, as usual, and did not measure the amount of liquid seasonings very carefully, so the lemongrass chicken I made this time was probably far from what it should have been. I hope the recipe owner and Vietnamese people don’t feel offended. It tasted alright… but I guess I'd prefer a simpler lemongrass chicken recipe without coconut milk and curry powder. Well... maybe next time.

Almost There... Peach Cobbler

Peach (Nectarine) Cobbler It has been my custom to make fresh peach cobbler at least once every summer since I came back to Kochi in 2000. Every time I tried a different recipe, and every time I thought “Well… not bad, but…” The problem was that I couldn’t find fresh yellow peaches and I didn’t want too-sweet canned stuff, so I always used white peaches. I love fresh white peaces so much, but when baked in a cobbler, I felt that something was not quite right. They didn’t go well with brown sugar as much as I had expected and I always preferred eating them raw. So this time I decided to use nectarines instead. Nectarines were on sale yesterday at the supermarket I always shop at. They were pitiful ones--- already turning brownish even though they were not quite ripe --- but I thought it wouldn’t matter too much when baked in a cobbler. I found this recipe on the net this afternoon and scaled it in half. I guess I didn’t make a mistake in calculation or conversion this time. I had to throw away some bad parts of the nectarines, but I had enough left for my half-sized cobbler. While it was in the oven, the wonderful smell of cinnamon and sugar filled my kitchen, and I realized that it was about a month ago when my kitchen was filled with the aroma from baking last time! It turned out pretty good. :D Using nectarines was definitely a right choice and I liked this recipe. Well, there’s actually a few things that I’d do differently next time: I’ll reduce the amount of brown sugar, add a bit more lemon juice and slice nectarines into thicker wedges so that I can enjoy their texture better. Also, I might use milk instead of hot water for the crust. But I’m glad I found this recipe. For some reason, I like “crust-on-top” peach cobbler recipes better than “peach-on-top” ones. Too bad that the nearby supermarket ran out of vanilla ice cream today!! Next time, I’ll make a bit less sweet version of this nectarine cobbler and, when I eat it, put a big scoop of ice cream on top while the cobbler is still warm… Hmmmmmmm!!!. For now I’m enjoying it with cool, crisp iced tea. Ah... heavenly. ;)

Peach & Cottage Cheese Salad

Peach & Cottage Cheese Salad When I posted about my ruby red grapefruit & cottage cheese salad, carlyn gave me an idea, in her comment, of making the same kind of salad with peach. So I tried it out for my brunch this morning. I think the lemon juice really played an important role in this otherwise just-sweet dressing. The overall sweetness with the soft texture of ripe peach gently woke up my sleepy stomach and it was a nice way to start the day. :)

Mom's Home-made Tokoroten (Agar noodles?)

Tokoroten My mom called me up last night and said she would bring me some home-made tokoroten today when she comes to Kochi city for a tea ceremony meeting. I met her in front of a train station this afternoon to receive a tiny cooler box with tokoroten and bunch of ice cubes and coolants stuffed inside. So what the heck is tokoroten anyway? OK, it’s jelly-like noodles… or should I say noodle-like jelly, or maybe, agar noodles? To make home-made tokoroten, you first need to get dried tengusa, a type of seaweed. (Of course it's easier to use dried kanten-bars or kanten powders. They are dried form of gelatin from the seaweed.) Well, my mom really made the tokoroten from scratch this time; she picked tengusa seaweed every time she went to the beach this summer, dried it and kept it somewhere in the house for about a month. She really loves doing things like that, but I do hope she stored the dried tengusa somewhere far away from kitchen this summer …because it really STINKS!! (The photo shows someone's tengusa bing dried, not my mom's.) Read More To make tokoroten from scratch, you soak dried tengusa in water first, and then boil it in water to which a little vinegar added. When the water thickens with the gelatin from the seaweed, strain it to remove the seaweed and pour the glue-like soup into a vat and refrigerate. I read somewhere that leaving it at room temperature to let it settle makes better-tasting tokoroten, but I don’t know if it’s true or not. This is the tokoroten I got from mom today. Now I'll show you how to make these tokoroten chunks into noodles. To do that, you need a special devise. As you can probably figure out from the way this devise looks, the process is pretty straightforward. You slip a tokoroten jelly chunk into this device and push it with the bar with a flat top. Then, tata～! You can eat tokoroten noodles with either sweet sauce or soy-vinegar sauce. I like soy-vinegar version better, with a bit of grated ginger and aonori ( green laver) maybe? This summer, tokoroten became suddenly popular throughout Japan and almost all the stores ran out of this summer food at one point. The reason was (I think) a TV show that introduces healthy foods and health tips every week. A few months ago, it featured tokoroten as a zero-calorie diet food which also reduces blood sugar, cholesterol, body fat and blood pressure, and raises basal metabolism. People rushed to the stores right after. To be perfectly honest, I don’t take what this TV show introduces at face value any more since the spring before. They said that eating yogurt and mackerel and drinking sweet Chinese tea would prevent cedar allergy (or reduce its symptoms), and I had them almost every day for good two months or so. And I ended up having real bad allergy symptoms that spring. So I don’t really expect to be super-healthy tomorrow morning, but it doesn't ruin my pleasure of enjoying the interesting texture of the noodles. Thanks mom. This tokoroten was just a little bit too soft for me, but pretty tasty! :D

Grape-infused Vodka

Inspired by rae’s recent post, I started making infused vodka about 2 weeks ago. This is what my grape-infused vodka looks like at this point. I poked the grapes with a toothpick to let the purple color come out from the skin. Right now the drink looks rather light pink than purple, but it’s getting sweeter and I do notice the fragrance of grape when I take a sip. Maybe it’d be really good and flavorful in another 2 weeks. Another project that's going on in my kitchen now is plum-infused vodka, but this is going to be a little disappointing. Its color is nice…but it’s rather tasteless compared to the grape-infused one. I wonder if it’s OK to add some sugar at this point…

Moko Moko Cheese Bread

Moko Moko Cheese Bread This bread looked so cute on the shelf at my favorite bakery. This was a sweet bread with condensed milk kneaded into the dough and lumps of sweetened cream cheese on top. Oh, and grated cheese (maybe parmigiana?) was sprinkled on top, too. Really yummy! ------- I posted a photo of me and my team mates from the dance festival here, if you’re interested. (Scroll down and see the one at the bottom.) :)

Drink, Drink, Drink... !!

******************************* Yes, dear readers, I survived!! ******************************* (If you’re interested in my experience of the festival this year, click here.) Unfortunately, there’s not many food-related topics regarding this festival. Our team supplied us with bentos for lunch and supper for 2 days, but they were nothing special, and I couldn’t take pics of them anyway because I didn’t bring my digital camera with me. What characterizes the festival every year is various kinds of drinks for the dancers!! Oh it was just like pouring liquid into a strainer. Whatever we drank came out instantly as sweat. Of course I couldn’t take pics of the drinks, either, but I can buy the same drinks at any supermarkets real easily, so I can post about them :) As I wrote in my post about the festival linked above, we danced outdoors in parking lots, shopping streets, shopping arcades and main streets. We “paraded” as we danced, and when we reached the end of each dance venue, we could get drinks at a small booth called “kyusuijo (water booth?).” There local volunteers poured iced tea or water in plastic cups for dancers and collected empty cups. (Only a few booths offered sports drinks perhaps because those are much more expensive than plain water and tea.) Now, each dance team consisted of 30 to 150 dancers, and at one venue, about 70 or 80 dance teams performed a day… I guess. Imagine how much work volunteers had to do to save us from dehydration… I thank them from the bottom of my heart. They are literally our lifesavers!! Also each dance team had a “drink-supply car” which met the team at the end of the performance at each venue and supplied drinks. So these are what I remember having at the festival this year. 1) plain cold water --- the most popular drink they gave us at the water booths (Not included in this pic.) 2) Iced Japanese tea or woo long tea (Back left in a big plastic cup) --- the 2nd most popular drink at the booths. 3) Iced water with a bit of lemon slice (Back right in a big plastic cup) --- One booth offered this drink and we liked the refreshing lemon flavor. 4) Lemoria (Paper pack on the left. The drink is in the small glass right next to the pack)--- Lemon-flavored soft drink with herb extract mixed. Supplied at the drink-supply car of our team and probably donated by the former sponsor of our dance team. 5) Kurozu (Dark vinegar) drink (Paper pack on the right. The content is in the small glass.)--- Same as above. Most (esp. middle-aged) dancers incl. myself rushed to the drink-supply car for this drink. The vinegar and ume-plum juice mixed in this drink were a good source of citric acid. 6) Umeboshi (Japanese plum pickles) --- These are not drinks, but supplied at a few booths. Great source of citric acid. Other than these drinks, some dancers brought a little amount of salt wrapped in plastic wrap and licked it when taking a break. I sneaked out and bought this because I was really running out of energy way before our supper time. This is "a special jelly drink to supply carbohydrates equivalent to a rice ball," according to the text on the package. I like this because it doesn’t cause stomachache even if I dance right after consuming it. You might think that instead of all those preparations and considerations about dancers’ conditions, we could just have this festival when the weather is cooler, and that would save a lot of money spent on the huge amount of drinks and make things easier and safer for the dancers, staff and audience. Well, tell you the truth; we are stupid and crazy. And being stupid and crazy is exactly the heart of this dance festival. Honestly ;) (I'm going to post some more about this festival to my another blog. If you check on them, you may or may not see why being stupid and crazy is so important for this event.)

My First BBQ This Summer

Last night I was invited to a wonderful BBQ party at my friend’s friend’s house. It was my very first BBQ this year and I’m so glad that I did have BBQ at least once this summer. At my friend’s friend's house, they had a nice small BBQ grill and a few small-size picnic tables in the backyard. Though it took a while to light charcoals, we enjoyed all the food and a nice chat, which was just exactly what I needed. For the record, we barbecued sliced beef, pork, eggplants, asparagus, green peppers and kabocha pumpkins, and we ate them with three kinds of yakiniku dipping sauce. We also had nigirizushi, fresh tomatoes, grapes, iced woo long tea and iced coffee. The dessert was cream puffs filled with ice cream. Very Japanese-style BBQ, isn’t it? (Sorry, no pics. I didn’t bring my digital camera.) ------ Well, dear readers, from today till this coming Saturday, I’ll be busy with the festival and will not have time to post anything. So, please keep your fingers crossed for my survival and come back this weekend to see if I’m still alive or not ;)

My Blueberries!

Gelatin Cheesecake with Blueberry Sauce Guess how many blueberries I was able to pick from my balcony garden this summer? 3.5. No, not thirty-five. Three point five. And the “point five” was the real tiny berry which was about half a size of a regular one. What can I make out of the 3 and 1/2 blueberries? I couldn’t think of anything but using them for garnishing. So this is what I did. I made a gelatin cheesecake and garnished it with a small slice of lemon, mint leaf and fresh blueberries from my balcony garden! (Yes, you guessed right --- the blueberry sauce is from the store, not home-made.) The gelatin cheesecake was just so-so, and the graham-cracker crust at the bottom fell off while transferring the cake to this plate. But, dear readers, to my biggest surprise, the fresh blueberries tasted WONDERFUL, even the half-size one, too!!! Since the blueberries I bought at the Sunday Market a while back tasted pretty tart, I expected mine to be the same, too. After all, the hot and humid climate here in Kochi cannot be so great for blueberries, and I didn’t do anything special to my blueberry plant… except watering it every day. So, I didn't expect much. My blueberries, however, tasted so sweet and flavorful, not like those I bought at the market at all !! Oh how wonderful it would be if I could pick more of such good tasting blueberries next year?! You might think I'm overreacting, but for me, fresh blueberries always meant something expensive, being imported from abroad. And probably because they were picked before completely ripe, they were usually a little tart. These days locally grown blueberries are available, but as I wrote above, they are still expensive and not very tasty. Being able to pick such expensive, foreign berries from my own balcony garden, when they are completely ripe and tasty, is almost like a dream come true for me. Next year, I might be able to make fresh blueberry shake at home!! :D Oh I can hardly wait.

Because It's Terribly Hot...

Shiratama Dumplings in Mint Liqueur Syrup Don’t you feel like jumping right into this bowl and swim with these shiratama dumplings? This dessert was an idea I found in a women’s magazine the other day. The pic looked so terribly attractive that I had to give it a try myself. The syrup was a mixture of mint liqueur, sugar and water. Buying mint liqueur for the syrup was not a problem. I found it at the liquor store where I bought the marsala wine the other day. The problem was the filling for the dumplings. The original recipe called for candied (or sugared?) lotus seeds, but I had no idea where I could find them. The ones I found on the net were so expensive. So for half of the dumplings, I used shiroan (sweet white bean paste) for substitution. The rest was left with no filling. What I learned from this experiment: 1) Shiroan filling does not go with mint liqueur syrup. It makes the minty syrup taste like TOOTHPASTE. 2) Plain dumplings taste better in the syrup than shiroan version, but rather tasteless. What could be a tasty filling for this dessert? What could go well with shiratama AND mint liqueur? Any ideas?